An Accuracy Enhanced Error Tolerant Adder with Carry Prediction for Approximate Computing

Abstract

This paper presents a new approximate adder design to improve the computation accuracy of the conventional error tolerant adder by leveraging a carry prediction technique with a sum generator. The proposed carry speculation scheme exploits inputs from a single bit position and effectively increase the bit width of the accurate addition. Implemented in a 65-nm CMOS technology, the proposed approximate adder is up to two times faster than, and twice as power efficient as, the traditional adders. Compared to the other approximate adders considered in this paper, the proposed adder achieves up to 3.7%, 15.5%, 79.9% and 79.9% reductions in the error rate (ER), mean relative error distance (MRED), mean error distance (MED) and normalized MED (NMED) respectively, at an extra cost of merely 4% to 6% in area, delay, and power. In addition, the proposed adder offers a good tradeoff between power/energy and accuracy and improves on power/energy-NMED products by up to 46%, outperforming other approximate adders.